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Smart Machines Shaping The Workforce Of The Future

In the Industrial Revolution, new technologies displaced manual jobs while also creating demands for new skills. Will smart machines replace knowledge work–and create demand for a new kind of workforce–in the same way?

The smart machine era will blossom through 2020, with the spread of technologies such as intelligent personal assistants, smart advisers and advanced global industrial systems making the smart machine era the most disruptive in the history of IT, predicts the Gartner Group’s Top 10 Technology Trends for 2014.

In addition, advances in artificial intelligence, speech recognition and machine learning are making it possible to automate knowledge worker tasks once seen as impossible for machines to perform, reports Mckinsey & Company.

So, how will this affect the nation’s 230 million knowledge workers?

Chief information officers will need to work collaboratively with executives in operations, human resources and other key areas to plan ways to leverage the benefits of smart machines while also understanding their impact on workforces, said Kenneth Brant, research director for the Gartner Group.

“Most business and thought leaders underestimate the potential of smart machines to take over millions of middle-class jobs in the coming decades,” said Brant. Indeed, Gartner’s 2013 CEO survey shows that 60% of CEOs believe that the emergence of smart machines capable of absorbing millions of middle-class jobs within 15 years is a “futurist fantasy,” but Gartner itself predicts that smart machines will have a meaningful business impact in half that time.

A true smart machine meets two criteria, said Brant. First, a smart machine does something that no machine was ever thought to be able to do. Using that yardstick, a drone delivering a package–a model being contemplated by Amazon–would qualify as a smart machine. However, using the second criterion for a true smart machine–whether the machine is capable of learning–the delivery drone fails the test.

Yet that same delivery drone–regardless of how smart it is–could still have a significant effect on productivity and employment in the shipping industry, said Brant. To that end, IT decision makers shouldn’t get too hung up on whether a computer can be mistaken for a human: “If you’re waiting for the smart machine to pass [the smart machine] test, then your business will already have been impacted,” said Brant.

Businesses need to prepare for the unique ways smart machines can impact their workforces. For example, smart machines can enhance productivity by freeing workers to do less repetitive tasks and more work that’s aspirational, said Brant.

But the nature of smart machines will also cause a different kind of labor disruption, he added. Change will happen on all levels–from delivery workers to college professors to lawyers who do discovery. “In the past, you always had this kind of upward movement where you can move up a rung when the jobs below you are automated,” he said. “Now, the change is happening at all rungs at the same time.”

With all of this said, smart machines won’t completely displace humans in the jobs they are doing now–-at least, not in the next decade, said Brant: “The human brain is a fantastic tool for general learning. We won’t replace it in that capacity very soon.”

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